My father, John Montgomery Lind, died just before 2 a.m. on this day nine years go, October 23, 2010. He spent most of the previous two years in the nursing home along Beretania Street in McCully, just a short distance from the where his small restaurant supply business was located for probably 30 years. I was at the nursing home with him until late the night before, but was not there when he passed away in the early morning hours.

In the past nine years, I’ve thought a lot about the things I never got around to asking him, about his life, his relationship with my mother, his relationships with other women, his role in the post-WWII period in Hawaii surfing and canoe racing, and even about the growth of the visitor industry, which he watched as an insider who met and worked with most of the players in the hospitality business while sellilng kitchen equipment and supplies to hotels and restaurants for more than 60 years.

And I have the occasional sense memory of him. We are now living in what had been my parents’ house during most of their 70 years of marriage, and although we remodeled it enough so that it’s not the same, there are still times that I can close my eyes and almost feel him sitting in “his” chair reading the newspaper, or walking from the master bedroom into the hall towards the bathroom, although the door to the bathroom isn’t in the same place after our renovation. Other times, when I’m walking from the living room towards our bedroom, which is still in the same place, I can easily close my eyes and see how it looked when I was just a kid and he returned home after a long weekend day in the sun at some Waikiki Surf Club event, tired, sunburned, and he would retreat into the bedroom and collapse on the bed for a while, and I would hesitantly follow, hoping to lie beside him for a few minutes to maybe hear something about the day as I attempted to feel some fatherly connection, if only briefly.

And now that we walk down the block to Waialae Beach Park every morning before dawn, I can easily imagine being transported back in time to when I was maybe between five and eight years old, and we would finish dinner and, shortly afterwards, he would walk my sister and me down the same street as the evening twilight deepened, and as we passed the park and got to the entrance of the Waialae Country Club, we would be enveloped by the raucous sounds of the hundreds, or possibly thousands, of mynah birds in a banyan tree beside the road where, many mynah generations later, they still carry on in their brash manner, morning and evening. Close your eyes and it could be then, or now.

The world turns.

Here’s a selfie taken with him at the nursing home where I would visit almost daily.